After 40 years, Warwick gets around to a bypass in Apponaug village

Sunday

Aug 10, 2014 at 10:23 PM

WARWICK, R.I. -- After decades of delay, the city finally is beginning roadwork that eventually will eliminate the racetrack-like “circulator” that for years has sped up traffic and slowed down business in the village.

By BARBARA POLICHETTI

WARWICK, R.I. — Orange traffic barrels and lane closures don’t usually make people happy, but city officials say they welcome the sight in Apponaug. It signals the start of roadwork that eventually will eliminate the racetrack-like “circulator” that for years has sped up traffic and slowed down business in the village.

“This will solve a problem that has gone on for nearly 40 years,” Mayor Scott Avedisian said of the state project that will take about three years to complete and cost more than $30 million.

While there are many aspects to the project, it basically will accomplish two things. It will eliminate the circle of one-way roads that loops around the historic village where City Hall stands, replacing them with two-way streets that will feature new sidewalks and better parking. And it includes a bypass road that will dramatically reduce the number of cars that race through the small business district on their way somewhere else.

When the project is completed — sometime in fall 2017 — the number of cars passing City Hall on Post Road is expected to drop from nearly 29,000 per day to 5,000 or 6,000, said Avedisian and Rick Crenca, principal planner for the city.

A certain amount of traffic is good for local businesses, Avedisian said, but when the state created the one-way Apponaug circulator in the late 1970s, it ended up funneling too much fast-moving traffic into the area.

Ironically, he said, it was only supposed to be an experiment, intended to boost the Apponaug business district.

“It didn’t work,” he said. “And it turned out to make things worse.”

Turning the sections of Post Road and Veterans Memorial Drive that encircle Apponaug into one-way streets, he said, resulted in multilane roads that inadvertently sped up traffic and made Apponaug Village bad for parking, pedestrians and shoppers.

The stretch of Veterans Memorial Drive that skirts the village’s north side is four lanes wide and handles about 49,000 cars per day — most of which are just cutting through the village to reach West Shore Road or the Route 95 ramps on Centerville Road.

With such a high volume of cars zipping through, many locals call the circulator the “Mini-Indy,” a wry nod to the famous Indianapolis racetrack.

“It’s almost impossible to cross the street,” Avedisian said as he looked out his office’s front window at the steady stream of cars roaring by.

“It’s just bad for business,” he said. “Usually, by the time someone sees a place where they want to stop, they’ve gone by it. And then you’ve got fast-moving traffic behind you.”

Avedisian said it didn’t take past city officials long to realize Apponaug needed to go back to having two-way streets, but it has taken decades to get state and federal funding, plus a design acceptable to engineers, residents and the business community.

When the project is done, Veterans Memorial Drive (where the police station and main fire station are located) will be changed from four lanes of one-way traffic to a divided two-way road, Crenca said.

The parkway, as well as Route 5 (Greenwich Avenue), will have direct access to the new bypass road that will connect with Route 117 (Centerville Road).

All but one section of Post Road also will carry two-way traffic. The only one-way stretch will be in front of City Hall, where the road also passes by a library branch, the Warwick Museum of Art, a post office and most of the village’s small businesses.

That stretch will have wider parking lanes and a bicycle lane, Avedisian said, and be much more like the old-fashioned Main Street it was intended to be.

The village intersections will no longer be right-angle junctures, he said, but will be “roundabouts” — small-diameter rotaries intended to slow down traffic but also keep it flowing.

Landscaping is a key part of the state’s plan for the village, Crenca said. Old curbing and crumbling retaining walls in front of homes and businesses also will be replaced.

“This will really be a transformation for Apponaug,” Avedisian said. “It’s not just about building new roads and new sidewalks.”

He added that taming the traffic, particularly along Veterans Memorial Drive, will make some properties that are now fallow more attractive for business development.

While the roadwork just began a week ago, Avedisian noted that the state has been working in the area for months, clearing overgrowth and taking down buildings to make room for the new bypass road and roundabouts.

The city, he said, is working on preserving the distinctive old “saw-tooth” factory building — so named because of its jagged roofline — near where the bypass road will connect to Route 117.

Despite the project’s enormous scope, Avedisian said, there no plans for complete road closures during construction.

There will be lane closures, and that will cause some traffic snarls, he said. “We just ask that people be patient.”

“In the end,” he said, “this project will be worth it, and will fix something that was supposed to be temporary nearly 40 years ago.”